For this study we explored future scenarios for 49 deltas, including the most populated and largest coastal deltas in the world, as well as a range of smaller and less populated deltas representing different climates, biomes, and socio-economic development states (Fig. 2). The set of deltas corresponds to only a fraction of the total number of deltas globally (cf. 235 large deltas of Reader et al., 2022; and the thousands of deltas of Nienhuis et al., 2020), but were chosen to represent a wide range of geographies and align with previous work on delta risk (Dunn et al., 2019; Tessler et al., 2015) and the availability of limited data on land subsidence (Nicholls et al., 2021). For our analysis we chose a set of 13 variables that represent various socio-economic and geophysical pressures on deltas and are indicators of the different components of delta risk as defined by Tessler et al. (2015) (Table 1).

This dataset is associated with the following publication: Scown, M., F. Dunn, S. Dekker, D. van Vuuren, S. Karabil, E. Sutanudjaja, M. Santos, P. Minderhoud, A. Garmestani, and H. Middelkoop. Global change scenarios in coastal deltas and their sustainable development implications. Global Environmental Change. Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam, NETHERLANDS, 14, (2023).